The Michael J. Bilandic Building, Chicago, home of the Illinois First District Appellate Court
CHICAGO — A Florida woman whose premature newborn son died in Florida after contracting an illness allegedly caused by consuming cow's milk-based infant formula, administered by medical staff in a Florida hospital can't use Cook County's famously plaintiff-friendly courts to sue Abbott Labs, the formula's Lake County-based manufacturer, a state appeals panel has ruled.
In the decision, the appellate justices said they believed that to find otherwise would essentially throw open the doors of Cook County's courts to similar lawsuits with no connection to Cook County.
The ruling was handed down on Sept. 11 by a three-justice panel of the Illinois First District Appellate Court in Chicago. It was issued as an unpublished order under Supreme Court Rule 23, which may limit its use as precedent.
The order overturned the ruling of Cook County Circuit Judge Brendan O'Brien. In 2025, O'Brien had rejected Abbott Labs' bid to dismiss the lawsuit under the legal doctrine of forum non conveniens.
Under that doctrine, translated from Latin as "inconvenient forum," defendants can seek to toss a lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs lodged their lawsuit in a court that should have no business hearing the dispute.
The lawsuit dates back to 2024, when attorneys from the Chicago personal injury law firm of Meyers & Flowers filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of plaintiff Lucinda Maria Alonso Rodriguez.
In the lawsuit, Rodriguez is seeking payment from Abbott Laboratories for the death of her infant son, who died of complications caused by the illness known as necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC.
NEC is a condition which results in the death of bowel tissue and can lead to severe illness and death in newborns, particularly if they are born premature. NEC carries a fatality rate of around 15-40% in infants suffering from the condition.
Rodriguez is a Florida resident whose son, born prematurely at 27 weeks gestation, died while undergoing care at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida.
Since 2020, lawsuits have poured into courts claiming Abbott Labs and their competitor, Mead Johnson & Co., the makers of Similac and Enfamil infant formulas, respectively, should be made to pay families with infants who died or were injured by NEC because the companies allegedly failed to warn the public about the alleged enhanced NEC risks posed by their cow's milk-based formulas, compared to human breast milk.
Thousands of lawsuits are pending in state and federal courts in Chicago and downstate Madison County, as well as other courts elsewhere in the U.S., all leveling the same claims against Abbott Labs and Mead Johnson.
While more than 800 of those lawsuits are pending in a consolidated action in Chicago federal court, hundreds more remain pending in state courts, including many in Cook County.
To this point, however, the cases in both federal and state courts generally have struggled to gain traction, overall. On one hand, juries in Illinois state courts have handed down big verdicts. In Cook County, for instance, a jury in April 2026 awarded a combined $70 million to the families of four infants who contracted NEC.
But other juries in Illinois and elsewhere have sided with the formula makers.
A federal judge in Chicago has ruled against plaintiffs in three cases, finding that plaintiffs' central claim — that their babies would have been fed human breast milk rather than the cow's milk-based infant formulas, if the companies had only better warned doctors and the public — didn't hold up, mostly because alternatives to those allegedly risky formulas are in short supply.
With that view, the judge ruled no "alternative warning" would have made much of a difference, because, essentially, doctors had to feed the babies something, regardless of the increased risk of NEC, relative to human milk.
And in another federal case in Chicago, a jury sided with Mead Johnson, finding the company couldn't be held liable for the death of a premature infant.
Some of the verdicts that juries have delivered for plaintiffs also have been overturned on appeal.
In June, for instance, an Illinois state appeals court reversed a $60 million verdict in favor of a plaintiff in a case out of St. Clair County.
Despite its relative success in court, Abbott Labs recently agreed to pay $670 million to settle about 2,000 NEC lawsuits.
However, the companies continue to defend themselves against a host of other lawsuits.
In the Rodriguez lawsuit, Abbott Labs argued the case didn't belong in Cook County court, but rather in court in Florida. The company asserted much of the evidence and witnesses it would need to defend itself were located in south Florida, "where all decisions about (the child's) medical care were made and where all his treaters work."
Further, Abbott Labs noted their company is also based in suburban Lake County, not in Cook County.
However, in Cook County court, Judge O'Brien sided with Rodriguez's attorneys, and ordered the case to remain in Cook County Circuit Court.
On appeal, however, the three-justice panel said the judge "acted unreasonably" in sharply discounting Abbott Labs' arguments.
They ordered the case dismissed, with instructions to Rodriguez and her lawyers to refile the action in Florida, if they wished to continue pursuing the case.
In the order, Justice Celia Gamrath noted the case's "connection to Illinois is tenuous at best..."
So, Gamrath said, "... 'it would be patently unfair to burden Cook County residents with jury duty and the expense associated with [this] complex trial' when Abbott is headquartered in Lake County and Lucinda’s home state bears the predominant connection to the litigation.
"Holding otherwise would invite every NEC case to be litigated here, regardless of where the families live, where the infants were born and treated, where the formula was prescribed and marketed, and where the injuries occurred."
Cook County has long served as an inviting destination for lawsuits, including many with "tenuous" connections to the county. Business groups and lawsuit reform advocates have linked that phenomenon to Cook County courts' penchant for delivering big payouts for plaintiffs.
Cook County, for instance, has been regularly rated as one of America's worst so-called "judicial hellholes," on the annual list published by the American Tort Reform Association.
In the most recent report, ATRA noted Cook County is home to more than 160,000 new lawsuits per year, or nearly half of all lawsuits filed in Illinois state courts each year.
Cook County is also home to the largest share of the so-called "nuclear verdicts" - or jury verdicts awarding $10 million or more to plaintiffs - in Illinois.
In the past 10 years, Illinois has ranked No. 6 among U.S. state court systems in delivering such verdicts against businesses, and placed in the Top 10 among U.S. states in 2024.
